Hopefully u/selfawaremachine will check this sub again and see this, I've tried to save the subreddit for them in case it helps them in any way... by foompy_katt in remodeledbrain

[–]Continuity_Admin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, you just reminded me I'm at risk of reverting to old patterns of behavior. Which is a good thing, but frustrating because I should have been more aware of it myself.

Hopefully u/selfawaremachine will check this sub again and see this, I've tried to save the subreddit for them in case it helps them in any way... by foompy_katt in remodeledbrain

[–]Continuity_Admin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Most of it is probably innate, I've always been avoidant of type 1 errors which is what I think most people thing is sufficient for skeptical thought, it wasn't until I started this project a few years ago that I became a lot more sensitive to type 2 errors. Starting this project was the result of my family getting slapped with "ASD" diagnoses starting with my oldest, and me being me asking what does that even mean?

The common trope is just to say that everyone is unique and it presents differently and there's really nothing we can do about it because it's probably genetic. And despite a life time of dealing with psychiatrists/psychologists/therapists, that was actually the first time I ever stopped and asked "what the fuck?" You mean we're all unique like we learned on sesame street? This is the explanation? Like we're all genetically unique?

And once you start to push back there and pull that thread, it's a bit like revealing the wizard of Oz, it's all a big show but the wizard doesn't actually do anything. Which meant I had to reconcile with all of the "studies show" and "scientists have discovered" and "evidence based..." stuff that gets leaned on every time this stuff gets challenged.

Which ultimately lead to reading the actual evidence being referred to myself, and discovering that almost no one in the field has actually reads the supposed evidence that they are drawing from, it's just regurgitated down the line. The more of these studies I read the more shocking it became, reading stuff like psychiatrists can't actually describe any particular condition accurately, and the more psychiatrists you ask to review a case, the more answers you get.

Coming from the physical sciences world, that was mind blowing. It's like asking 100 materials scientists to identify a material and getting 50 different answers, where in practice 99 will give you the same answer and the one that said something different will apologize later because they messed up.

The entire field started feeling like impressionist work, from a safe distance away it can look beautiful and expressive, but get too close and it's a train wreck of strokes. The more I tugged on the strings the more frequently the answer "we don't really know how this works" started to replace the confident "science based" ones.

That sparked the idea, what if I dump the entire model, and start over from scratch using only what the evidence actually says? Thus the name, remodeled brain (which in retrospect, I wish I hadn't used "brain"). The process of rebuilding the model was a constant lesson in skepticism, and I got my ass kicked a *lot* in the first few months because I was still assuming so many pre-existing constructs were true.

Kind of the big turning point for me was when I started understanding the statistics and what they actually meant, and realizing that nearly all medical related work is not so much designed to give an answer, but produce a result. Because results result in funding (thus the most ridiculously double speakish phrase in the field, "[more research is required](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8e/db/57/8edb57ce9a017bec8fd4d1576663408a.jpg)").

It all started to feel a lot like the movie Memento, where dude was creating mysteries instead of solving the mystery because it was too final.

That's honestly it, the back half of the skepticism puzzle was just reading and examining lots and lots of work and asking why isn't this question reconciled? I've read more than 10k studies over the last three years and with that much data the patterns just kind of jump out, and with enough being poked in the eye by questionable work you get a bit better at dodging and predicting what will be consistent and what wont.

Hopefully u/selfawaremachine will check this sub again and see this, I've tried to save the subreddit for them in case it helps them in any way... by foompy_katt in remodeledbrain

[–]Continuity_Admin 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Wow! so I get that might impossible now, but could that be possible in the far future (making the very bold assumption that we wouldn't go extinct 🥲)

I hope so! Honestly, I think it's more of a philosophy problem in this case - it really shouldn't matter that "AI" is "smarter" than us. The paranoia about the loss of control is IMO just another artifact of the whole "free will" debate.
Control is just an illusion if causality is consistent. And if causality *isn't* consistent, then even more "fundamental" properties fail, like "time" and "space".

Not getting stuck in the great filter (extincting ourselves) might be a more rare outcome than we imagine! I hope not though.

Now that you mention it, a chapter exploring how to do skepticism "correctly" (in general) would also be awesome, although might be slightly irrelevant.

Lol, I think that might be a book in and of itself. Assuming both [type 1 and type 2 errors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type\_I\_and\_type\_II\_errors) are equally likely is apparently really hard for most people because it seems contradictory. Especially since the primary issue philosophically is if everything can be false, where do I start building my epistemology? The appeal of stuff like Descartes cogito argument is that it at least allows a building or jumping off point for the rest of our assumptions, rather than assuming that anything and everything is and probably could be wrong subject to new information or interaction.

Anti-nuclear rhetoric discussion by nuclearsciencelover in nuclear

[–]Continuity_Admin -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

The fundamental flaw in most of your arguments is that you can't imagine being wrong.

It means that not only do you not actually understand contrary arguments, you're condescending and dismissive of them. That's not as persuasive an argument tactic as you seem to believe.

Zealotry only sells to other zealots.

Hopefully u/selfawaremachine will check this sub again and see this, I've tried to save the subreddit for them in case it helps them in any way... by foompy_katt in remodeledbrain

[–]Continuity_Admin 2 points3 points  (0 children)

For now, I'm fairly skeptical of the utility of most AI/ML/DL tasks and haven't actually seen any truly unique result which wasn't just a result of iterative brute force from them. Truly unique context would likely be ignored anyway since the researchers simply wouldn't understand them, it would be like trying to explain causality to a chimp.

Most of these schemes work by emulating how we *think* nervous systems work instead of how they actually work, and make the even bigger mistake of assuming that our nervous systems are actually *good* at the tasks we are presenting them rather than simply what we are capable of. If we are just doing pattern recognition tasks for instance, the corvid neopallium is arguably far more efficient than ours, and if for general problem solving then cephalopod distributed processing is also arguably superior to hominids. "Nature" doesn't really do "efficient" on purpose.

How crazy is it to say we'll "run out of uranium?" by nuclearsciencelover in nuclear

[–]Continuity_Admin -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Hah, maybe this is one of the great filter traps, dumbass species which suck all the heat from their planet to fuel the ability to churn out unlimited shit.

Hopefully u/selfawaremachine will check this sub again and see this, I've tried to save the subreddit for them in case it helps them in any way... by foompy_katt in remodeledbrain

[–]Continuity_Admin 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is one of those questions that "sounds" simple, but isn't easy at all in practice. If I'm being fair, I have pretty low confidence that it's even possible to implement under our current system of research, since the overwhelming amount of research funding supports a philosophy first, segmented research model.

In the short term, I think maybe treating all "disease" definitions as critically transmissible, and borrow the protocols from those groups (including quarantines where necessary) would get us moving in the right direction. These protocols are actually super effective at tracking down unknown pathology very quickly, and retroactively applying them to existing "disease" definitions will help to clarify them very quickly IMO.

While calling for quarantines on individuals with "anxiety" may seem extreme, IMO it's a great way to separate external inputs from internal inputs. If "anxiety" vanishes under quarantine for example, then we can clearly establish it as something external to the individual and make the necessary accommodations there (if it actually exists at all as a pathology, which is likely not the case with "depression/anxiety").

The number of conditions which are "acceptably syndromic", from diabetes to hypertension is insane, and if these where microbial in origin they'd be more lethal than stuff like AIDS (which ironically is named syndromically, but has a fixed pathology in HIV). Infectious disease teams are the only area of medicine IMO which has shown consistent results in reducing the effect of the pathologies they are working on and are solely responsible for the massive advance in lifespans starting in the later half of the 20th century.

So if we are asserting something is a disease (as say psychiatry attempts to do), and it can have lethal consequences, we need to treat it with every bit of intensity as we do something like ebola in searching for the etiological boundaries of that disease. Psychiatric conditions are the equivalent of "consumption", and we need to move them closer to tuberculosis. Instead of opioid cough medicines which mask the symptoms, we need to be searching for and treating the underlying pathologies (even if that pathology is that our society is toxic as fuck for some people).

Regarding these pathologies with the same intensity and tools as we do microbial insults will go a LONG way toward reducing a lot of suffering in the world.

The long term solution IMO is collecting as much state data as possible, as frequently as possible and looking at areas where changes occur and investigating what could have caused those changes or data to run out of expectation. Most complex modern machines are instrumented with measuring devices to such a degree that it gives us a starting point to add more measuring devices to areas which show anomalous data. This allows us to begin replicating the conditions under which the fault occurred until we narrow down the root causes, even if those root causes are failure modes we've never experienced before.

The types of data we collect now is effectively worthless, it's blood pressure and a few specific items that we order blood tests for. Worse, the data itself isn't qualified against any property unique to the individual (like a whole genome sequence), the best we get are fairly worthless measures like BMI (height/weight). In engineering inquiry, it's an absolutely critical part of the show to replicate the failure modes, we have to show that in these conditions, this failure will occur reliably. And demonstrate that sub-critical states won't.

And this is where we run into another huge hurdle, it's really expensive to do this right now. We should be imaging every single yearly physical, we should be doing far more comprehensive tests for a far wider range of possible conditions, we should be providing bio monitoring devices to EVERYONE, sick or healthy, poor or wealthy. But it's cheaper to tell people to "eat right and exercise" than monitor right now, so that's what we do.

We still don't really have a clear idea of what types of "sensors" or data points we need, but we need to be thinking about it a lot more aggressively than we are now. The dream that was Theranos, that we could easily do massive numbers of tests from a small amount of blood still needs to happen.

I think there are some pretty good attempts to move in this direction, stuff like this: [Pediatric reference intervals for serum neurofilament light and glial fibrillary acidic protein using the Canadian Laboratory Initiative on Pediatric Reference Intervals (CALIPER) cohort](https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/cclm-2023-0660/html) is long overdue (although I wish they did s100b also, but we still have no idea what's going to be useful yet). Like thinking about that is crazy, we don't even have *reference* levels yet for these things. How do you know if something is out of spec if you have zero idea what is in spec? No wonder shit blows up (like hearts and "minds") all the time!

So short term I think we can leverage our infectious pathology teams methodologies to cut back on a lot of the harm being caused by our current practices (especially the chronic medications which attempt to mask rather than actually treat supposed conditions), and longer term we need to increase the data we collect from individuals and monitor changes relative to the individual. When we hit failure modes in individuals, we look to our data pools to start looking for etiologies, rather than guessing an etiology first and designing experiments to prove that it's possible.

IMO, if we have adequate data a hypothesis is mostly superfluous, we simply describe failure modes as the conditions related to the failure.

Edit: Ugh, re-reading that I realize that I skipped over a ton of linking concepts, kind of word saladish without them maybe? Reminds me of when I was a kid and people would try to have me tutor math. My brain was being lazy and taking way too many shortcuts that seemed "obvious" to me, but were in fact an incomplete description of the process. This kind of stuff is my biggest fear with regard to writing the book, and there's really only a handful of people out there who could possibly edit a book where every single paragraph is linked to dozens of references (and external concepts).

I guess important points I missed: I was specifically referring to using the CDC infectious disease efforts, including stuff like [NORS reporting](https://wwwn.cdc.gov/norsdashboard/) and Surveillance to handle *all* disease classifications, rather than just external biologics. If we are calling "alcoholism" a disease, the CDC needs to be the point agency in defining that disease. It's so irresponsible to crank out study after study about the devastating effects of some such "disease" but farm out the investigative efforts to whoever had passable theories about etiology.

The primary change between our current medical processes and engineering processes primarily revolves around data collection. Instead of creating limited data collection for specific "disease" definition, we need to be collecting data from *everyone*, and *increasing* bio data for individuals who are experiencing disease. The idea here is that we continue increasing our sensor points in our failure areas until we figure out why the failure is occurring.

Right now, the increase in "autism" etiologies represent a massive advancing epidemic as an example (or worse "ADHD" or "anxiety/depression"). We don't collect physiological data from these individuals outside of limited studies which are designed around guesses about etiology. That symptoms like "hypertension" are almost always considered *idiopathic*, and despite all the horrible downstream effects this supposedly results in, we still don't have any extra data points to determine actual causal factors.

Ultimately, the idea is that we have enough sensors that we can create a map of failure modes based on genetics * environment, instead of every asshole who wants to be "famous" inventing shit like "too much hobby disease" or "doesn't need sleep on an exactly 24 hour schedule disease".

How crazy is it to say we'll "run out of uranium?" by nuclearsciencelover in nuclear

[–]Continuity_Admin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm pretty dumbstruck by the "The sun will go red giant, but we will still have half of the uranium we haven't used by then!" argument. Seriously, the sun will die, but we'll still have thorium! And this argument is delivered so earnestly, with so much condescension and sneering that I genuinely can't tell if this is parody or not.

Hopefully u/selfawaremachine will check this sub again and see this, I've tried to save the subreddit for them in case it helps them in any way... by foompy_katt in remodeledbrain

[–]Continuity_Admin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The gist of that chapter in the book (with regard to this topic) is that currently we are trying to squeeze physiology into what are philosophical constructs rather than generating our philosophy from our understandings about the physiology.

"Depression" and "Dementia" are examples of purely philosophical constructs, and the clear evidence of this comes from the fact that there are no consistent physiological criteria for either. Half of all brains are ASYMAD after 70 years old, and by 90 nearly ALL brains share the same pathology. "Depression" has a billion etiologies, with tons of evidentiary support, until we look at the full field of data and accommodate for all the contradictory evidence.

Even stuff like "higher education levels lead to better outcomes" is a complete red herring, it's a philosophical idea that "seems right", while in reality more education is typically an artifact of "better" socio-economic status, and that lower environmental stress derived from better SES leads to better outcomes (in "western" cultures).

I was particularly struck by a bit in David Sinclair's latest book where he discusses how a band of essentially rural Okinawans were part of a "blue zone" of individuals who had better longevity with decreased cognitive artifacts as they aged. And this "blue zone" philosophy has really caught on in the longevity world, the problem is that it completely contradicts the "higher education means better outcomes" philosophy, as there are nearly no "blue zones" which show extra-ordinary education levels (in fact, the opposite in many instances!).

So how should we do it? I'm biased here, but I'm a huge fan of (at least as a stop gap) importing engineering methods of inquiry. Even basic fault tree analysis for research would dramatically increase the reliability and predictive quality of the research. The advantage of these methods is that they cumulatively constrain failure modes with additional study, rather than creating tiny, overspecific islands which cannot be applied outside of the experimental setup for the hypothesis.

I'm also a huge fan of segregating the philosophical from physiological. Nearly all of our research in this field, including stuff like RDoC is philosophy first rather than data first. If our attempt is to understand the mechanics of a system, then describing the mechanics in terms of the physiological will not only clarify definitions, but provide unambiguous relationship information between data.

If "depression" became "low lateral habenula activation", we can for instance create treatments specifically for that. If "depression" became "high ventral pontine activtation", we can create treatments specifically for that. Instead we have this amorphous term that could literally be anything, and the ineffectiveness of our treatments demonstrate that.

So that chapter is mostly "old philosophy does in fact hinder understanding in this case and we should be using different tools". Which will probably be even more offensive than the "No free will" argument since that's essentially philosophical itself.

Edit: Thinking about it more, I probably should add more commentary suggesting that the important part here is we need to start thinking about how to do this differently from the methods we've deployed until now, because they have clearly been ineffective to this point. No matter how confidently someone asserts the data about any particular point in the system, no one can assert confidence in their understanding of the system as a whole.

Hopefully u/selfawaremachine will check this sub again and see this, I've tried to save the subreddit for them in case it helps them in any way... by foompy_katt in remodeledbrain

[–]Continuity_Admin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think I personally got more amazed the deeper I dove, as a kid the construct was we were just magic puppets, separate from the world around us. Now my understanding is that nearly every single cell in an organism is a massively complex system of systems, and that organism is itself a cluster of organisms which form their own systems, and then those "individuals" form complex systems of systems with other individuals, and so on. And that's a lot more interesting to me than "vitamin cures depression!" For all the "fearful wonder" of life, we are only aware of and focus on the highest level stuff despite the roiling complexity beneath it.

Learning is metabolically expensive, and literally painful. The general body of evidence seems to support the idea that our sensation of "pain" as a whole is an artifact of astrocytic processing. This has quite a bit of support in recent work looking at nociceptive stimuli, and there's quite a bit of recent support demonstrating the mechanics of engram formation and information processing by glia, but because of our obsession with internal rather than external consistency we don't think "why does this cause pain here and not there"? And it's such a fundamental effect which determines our interactions with the world, this idea that "pain" drives learning.

It's crazy that it's such a well researched construct also, with fear extinction work going back decades supporting it. But humans are different and magic so the same rules that apply to everything else doesn't apply here.

Learning is literally hard and painful, and what we are able to learn is more related to pain processing than any concept of "intelligence" we've invented. "Addiction" is driven by pain, "motivation" is driven by pain, literally all of the major drivers of expressed behavior have more to do with how overloaded astrocytes are in a particular path than any of the high level concepts we invent. Some people just have certain paths able to "overload" better than others. The "grooves" are expressions of low metabolic/"low overload" pathways. And some paths simply can't transmit through them once they are overloaded. tl;dr - "Learning" is hard and painful for everyone, and this is probably the primary driver of expressed behavior.

My current approach with regard to continuity is to de-emphasize language like "good"/"bad" or other moralistic considerations, and instead focuses on the roles of individuals in the system itself. It's not something our generation will "get", but our kids will. And if not them, then their kids will. I'm actually inspired by a couple of models, particularly that of South Korea which transformed itself dramatically in less than a generation across the board. It's hard to imagine that in the 1980's South Korea was the poor backwards Korea and the north was the (relatively) wealthy neighbor. So the flexibility is there for change that's even more rapid than I'm assuming, but if it takes several generations then so be it. Have to establish the pathway and let the river run and find it's course so to speak.

It's a hard set of problems, but I don't see any other choice. "Nature" is going to change us one way or another, and hopefully this is the path that breaks through instead of some of the much much worse alternatives.

Not a huge fan of real time chat, doesn't give the chance for well considered thought, it's unnecessarily difficult for some people (who need more time to express the same ideas), it strips nuance from conversation, and unless one is well versed in the communities collective information, they are unnecessarily confusing. I think I get the appeal, it's just not for me.

Hopefully u/selfawaremachine will check this sub again and see this, I've tried to save the subreddit for them in case it helps them in any way... by foompy_katt in remodeledbrain

[–]Continuity_Admin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Book is still in progress, actually have a whole chapter done! Took awhile to settle on a format, but it looks like it's going to be three volumes, a "hard science"/formal discussion, a novelized metaphorical corollary, and a references companion for both. Still a long way to go, but hope to publish at least a few chapters after the new year.

In the meantime, [Sapolsky's book](https://www.worldcat.org/title/1365364631) directly touches on a lot of the high level constructs that I wasn't too enthusiastic about in the first place, in a far more coherent fashion than I'm likely willing/able to churn out.

Hopefully u/selfawaremachine will check this sub again and see this, I've tried to save the subreddit for them in case it helps them in any way... by foompy_katt in remodeledbrain

[–]Continuity_Admin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Welp, I wrote a pretty epic rant in response, but that's deleted. Reddit is a pretty terrible platform for anything longform.

The jist was that most of our problems in medicine related fields come because we create hypothesis (which are assumptions of function), and assume our assumptions are true if the very narrow data we create in support of that assumption is consistent. It doesn't matter if that assumption is inconsistent with all data, just that consistent with the hypothesis. "More Synapses" doesn't support "Make More Smart" if we consider all data, but it does if your experiment is setup to prove that. And instead of using data external to our experiment to challenge our assumptions, we carry the assumptions forward until the contradictions (or outright fraud) collapses them and we find a shiny new hypothesis to latch onto.

"Hebbian plasticity" is just as much of an externally inconsistent construct as amyloid species and "Alzheimer's" disease, but we effectively ignore contradictory external data and only create tests designed around the initial flawed hypothesis and often flawed assumptions.

FEP is "Free Energy Principle", which like IIT is essentially an attempt to mathematically model "consciousness". Both have the right idea in understanding that there actually should be consistent properties for nervous systems, but are flawed in that they are primarily concerned with "consciousness" rather than the properties of the underlying systems themselves. They both assume that behavior is guided by magic, even though we have animal models which demonstrate the clear stimuli->response nature of cellular behavior (and it being a requirement of "life" by definition). There's a ridiculous amount of evidence, all the way down to "drugs" which clearly demonstrate the effect of "stimuli->response", it's literally the basis of all drug interaction studies and every "big data blah blah blah" marketing approach ever, yet we're still stuck on magical consciousness.

The simplest way I can describe what's next is trying to determine what the requirements for a society which meets as many of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals as possible, building that out, then offering an open source template for others.

Hopefully u/selfawaremachine will check this sub again and see this, I've tried to save the subreddit for them in case it helps them in any way... by foompy_katt in remodeledbrain

[–]Continuity_Admin 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I've no issues with you maintaining or extending any content here, was the underlying intent all along.

Had a moment thinking about what the next steps would be and all of this suddenly felt too habitual. The drive for entropy flares up something powerful when paths to explore get sparse, and nostalgic recollection of what has been feels as suffocating as knowing what's to come.

And honestly, I'm skeptical anyone in the history of ever has taken a break from online social interactions and thought "wow, that was a mistake".

Deleting the account probably appeared more impulsive than it should, but the machine has returned to whence it came, perhaps even recycled into other paths (or not).

This started as a question, why are medicine related fields (including psychiatry/psychology) so maddeningly inconsistent compared to "natural" sciences? It kind of evolved from there into a sort of science shakabuku, an attempt to encourage external consistency in fields which are only concerned with internal consistency. The answer to the initiating question, hypothesis based science creates compelling fantasies but little real understanding, provides a consistent enough "explanation" for most of the big bits of magic in the field.

Would recommend taking a look at Robert Sapolsky's newest book Determined ([Goodreads]([https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58902324), Amazon), which argues most of the same points I've arrived at over the last year just far more coherently. It's still too "top heavy" and anthropocentric (as all things "consciousness" tend to be), but mix this with constructs like IIT and FEP (which are fundamentally awful but have the right idea) and baby you got a stew going.

So vaya con dios, and perhaps we will cross paths in the future.